Monkeys!

There is something fun about monkeys.  I don't know what it is.  Maybe it is because they are silly creatures by nature.  Not many animals are quite so amusing to watch.  I remember a time when I was a young child and went to the zoo on a field trip.  There was this big gorilla sitting there, looking all surly.  This was the days before they had nice habitat environments.  This gorilla was stuck in a small cage with a much smaller monkey.  That little one was a punk.  He kept coming up to the big monkey and poking him, and pulling his ears, and doing all sorts of stuff.  That gorilla didn't look happy, but with each poke it was obvious he was not taking kindly to this type of abuse.  Seeing that big lug tormented by that little guy had us all rolling.  It was hysterical.  But not as funny as the next part. After about the dozenth poke, that big gorilla grabbed that monkey and threw him over his knee, giving him the spanking of his life.  That baby monkey squealed...and so did we.  To us 1st graders, this was about the funniest thing we'd ever seen.  To this day the thought of it makes me smile.  Monkeys are fun.  Monkey are funny.

The prospect of doing a monkey story for Bitmap World was appealing when Tess first mentioned it.  We did the set-up well at the beginning of the strip, and over time have dropped hints.  Though through the progression of strips, it was pretty obvious to the reader what was going on, today's strip was clear confirmation. 

Since this storyline has been playing out for so long, I really wanted to make the monkey(s) memorable. My first foray into drawing monkeys was a couple years back, when I wanted to draw a caricature picture of my family.  I like doing different icon versions of us, so this one was particularly fun.  These monkey were done totally from scratch.  I should note I added the last girl monkey on the end before posting the pic here--at the time we only had 7 kids.



Though I think these monkey are very cute, I wanted monkeys with more of an "awwwww" factor.  I also wanted ones that could be very expressive facially, as well as being sized along the lines of the character, Max. After looking at TONS of monkey pictures, from lineart and pixelart versions, to real monkey photos, I decided to use a manga-type monkey.  Though the drawings are mine, they were heavily influenced by a lot of the art you can find on Japanese doll and room generators.



I had a blast coming up with the various expression, some of which haven't been featured in the strip yet.

We have a definite resolution to the monkey storyline planned.  But, I do have to admit, the monkeys are so darned cute, I do hope we'll have an opportunity to use them again in the distant future.